sisyphusshrugged | good questions

Prof. DeLong is perplexed

Are they mad?
WSJ.com - Bush Hopes Voters Notice Economy: Dogged by Iraq, administration officials hit battlegrounds today touting job growth. "A body in every state," one aide says -- including the president in Louisiana, Treasury Secretary John Snow at an auto plant in Ohio and Commerce Secretary Don Evans at a town meeting in Florida. "The jobs situation is improving," but "it may take a little while before that perception is widely held," says campaign adviser Ralph Reed."...
What do they hope that voters notice about the economy? That the pure Republican congress cannot pass a budget resolution? That we have the worst employment growth performance since Herbert Hoover--1.5 million fewer nonfarm payroll jobs than at the start of 2001? That the Bush administration has spent its time passing very expensive tax cuts that do little to boost employment in the short run?

Why is a mystery. You would expect an administration as political as the Bush administration to have focused on pursuing economic policies to boost employment. But no. It looks like, as a couple of economists have put it, like "nobody listened to Larry Lindsey because his shirttail was out and he had said the Iraq war might cost $200 billion, Glenn Hubbard really wanted to cut dividend taxes, and nobody else in the room had a clue about the employment impact of different policy options."